Cruising along…
Feb 182021
Feb 112021
Recently finished, the CAD model for a 1/144 scale kit for Fantastic Plastic. This Convair idea utilized the same “landing boat” that Fantastic Plastic recently released in 1/48 scale. It’ll be a fairly simple kit. The design was illustrated in a number of renderings from the very late 1950’s/early 60’s, used often by or in conjunction with Krafft Ehricke as he tried to sell Americans on the future in space that they would soon have.
The vehicle had a landing boat at the top and a habitat module below it; below that is the stage with three RL-10 rocket engines, with six drop tanks around it. *Presumably,* the tanks, along with the landing gear, would be dropped shortly after launch from the Moon, with fuel in the main core providing not only the boost back to Earth but also a braking thrust to at least slow the ship, because I have *serious* doubts about that boat surviving a lunar re-entry.
Feb 112021
It has been officially decided to go with 1/288 scale for the IXS Enterprise, making the model somewhat larger. Progress continues; the pylons have some more detail, the warp rings have been split into three inner segments, four outer segments, with a wall thickness of about an eighth inch and a hollow within, allowing lighting for those so ambitious.
Feb 102021
My first book contract had the due date for the manuscript in July, 2020. But guess what, a pandemic came along and shoved that back a full year. So I got a *second* contract, with a due date in January 2021. But guess what… pandemic pushed it to March. That book is *almost* done, but I’ve taken a bit of a break from it to work feverishly on a completely different project: a CAD model of the “IXS Enterprise.” This is a notional spacecraft designed by artist Mark Rademaker to illustrate what a spacecraft based on an Alcubierre Warp Drive might look like; NASA has used various renderings of this vehicle quite often for that purpose.
The CAD model, which is being produced with the assistance and approval of Mr. Rademaker and Dr. Harold White of NASA, will be used to 3D print master parts for a 1/350 scale resin model kit to be released by Fantastic Plastic. As originally designed the IXS Enterprise had a length of 62.3 meters (which is being changed due to recent updates in the design) and the overall diameter is 41.3 meters. The model will thus be 17.8 cm/7 inches long by 11.8 cm/4.64 inches in diameter. This will put it in scale with the Polar Lights NCC-1701 Enterprise kit and the Moebius XD-1 USS Discovery kit, along with a whole bunch of ships.
UPDATE: there has been discussion about the scale of the model… chances are fair that it will get bumped up to 1/288 scale from 1/350. That would make it 8.5 inches long by 5.6 inches diameter.
The project to convert the original CAD model into a printable kit is proceeding at a good pace.
Feb 102021
This looks interesting…
“The High Frontier: the untold Story of Gerard K O’Neill” looks to be a documentary about just what the title says. When does it come out? That piece of info doesn’t seem available on their website, sadly.
Feb 072021
Some Fantastic Plastic model kits that I made the master CAD parts for are back in stock:
Northrop M2-F3, 1/48 scale
Soviet LK Lunar Lander – 1/48 scale
SHIELD Helicarrier – 1/1400 scale
Some others of interest after the break…
Feb 032021
A model I CADded up last year for Fantastic Plastic is coming along in the process. This was a design that was constantly flacked by Krafft Ehricke of Convair back in the late 1950’s, included in everything from small Atlas-derived space stations on up to lunar landers. The references for it showed the design wandering all over the place in terms of shape and dimensions; whether this was due to the design constantly changing or – as seems more likely – artistic license is not entirely clear. Evidence suggests that the design was improved and evolved to become the “landing boat” for the larger Project Orion vehicles designed int he very early 1960’s by General Atomic. GA was a division of General Dynamics, and there was some crosstalk about various aspects.
Convair Space Station Lifeboat
The model is not yet now available for sale, but will be soon. It will be a pretty straightforward kit in 1/48 scale.
Jan 292021
Books that I can confidently state should be owned (because I own them):
Space Resources and Space Settlements
Space Settlements: A Design Study
The High Frontier: Human Colonies In Space
The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel
Colonies in Space: A Comprehensive and Factual Account of the Prospects for Human Colonization of Space
– – – – – – – – – – –
Books that look promising, but that I don’t have firsthand experience with:
Mining the Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets
Space 2.0: How Private Spaceflight, a Resurgent NASA, and International Partners are Creating a New Space Age
Space Settlements
MARS COLONIES: Plans for Settling the Red Planet
And then… there’s this:
Designing and Building Space Colonies: A Blueprint for the Future
Looks good. But then comes the authors bio: “Martin’s interest in the Paranormal, Spirituality, and much more goes back to his childhood. He has had many paranormal experiences and has been a student of Eastern Philosophies and Meditation for 35 years. Seeking Enlightenment; he knows that we are already all Enlightened. We just have to realize this deeply. His books are expressions of his creativity to help others understand what he has internalized through study, experience, and membership in different societies.” Ummmm……
Jan 282021
Sigh. It’s sad to think that in many ways the 1970’s were more forward thinking than today. Solar Power Satellites the size of Manhattan, space colonies the size of small states. Today… apart from SpaceX, about the most you can hope for is ever more social media. Until, of course, you get deplatformed.
Below is a piece of NASA-Ames art depicting the interior of an Island 3 colony. The full size version is downloadable HERE. This was intended to be a cylinder 5 miles or so in diameter by 20 long, rotating along the long axis to generate “gravity.” In this design, fully one third of the “land area” was given over to windows that would bring in sunlight via mirrors. Other notions included mounting strips of very powerful artificial light on the “ground” facing up to light the other side (this was the Babylon 5 approach), mounting strips of artificial light along the central axis pointing outwards, having external parabolic mirror beam sunlight through the central axis and reflected or diffused outwards. In order for an island 3 habitat like this to be dynamically stable, you’d need two of them, side by side, rigidly linked at the hubs. This would counter the torque and prevent the cylinders from converting rotation around the long axis into end-over-end tumbling, which is the natural response of something like this (experiment: try to spin a pencils around the long axis. You will inevitably end up with it tumbling)
The NASA art below shows an exterior view of a complete colony.The habitats would need to be pretty close to the same mass, but otherwise their interiors could be very different… one could replicate, say, farmland and meadows and such with small towns scattered about; the other could have forests and large cities. One could be in winter, the other in summer. The full-rez is downloadable HERE.
There is a ring of “cans” around the end of each habitat. These are the agricultural units for the habitat; each independently spin around their own axis, generating the level of artificial G appropriate to grow wheat or corn or weed or hay or whatever is needed. Being smaller in radius, Coriolis effects would be substantially more noticeable; but as plants don’t care, and the job of agriculture will probably be done by robots, it doesn’t matter much. Each farm would be pretty well closed off from the others, so if some sort of blight were to pop up, chances are good it could be contained.
A few years ago I had a notion for a book – half technical descriptions, half manifesto/screed – about megaprojects. A description of not only what mankind could do given time and energy, but what mankind *should* do in time. As with a lot of things, this books got squashed by the realization that its already been done (gosh, thanks Isaac Arthur), but I still kinda want to 3D CAD model one of these things. I’ve not thought about that book in some years… got a hundred pages into it, I think. Shrug.
Jan 262021
I’ve found that archives going from pure-paper to digital to be as much a curse as a blessing. Sure, the stuff that gets scanned and placed into publicly accessible archives? Great. But… often enough, archives that scan their stuff often decide that once the original is digitized they have no further use for the original… and it gets thrown away or outright destroyed. that wouldn’t be *too* bad if the scans were good. but too often they’re not. All too often the scans are *crap.* For example, some years back NASA scanned in the files of a deceased engineer. *Lots* of great stuff was scanned and made available. A lot of what the guy had were large format diagrams of hypersonic aircraft… X-24C derivatives, hypersonic research aircraft, HSTs, that sort of thing. What actually got scanned: just the data block. The on-hand scanner was good for letter size, so rather than going to the bother of scanning the large format sheet in chunks, or taking it somewhere than had a large format scanner, whoever did the scanning just scanned, essentially, the title of the thing. And then what? NASA destroyed the originals. You can see the titles, you can see perhaps a piece of a tail or a wingtip… and in all probability that’s all you will *ever* see, because they just couldn’t be bothered.
Recently the “AF FOIA Reading Room” appeared. I’ve found a *few* things of interest on it, one being a summary of the F-108 and B-70 programs. It’s reasonably well illustrated, which is a bonus. Should be great, right? Prepare to be disappointed. Here is the quality of the digitized document… 2-bit black and white at low resolution:
That’s friggen’ craptacular. 2-bit is always the mark of not-giving-a-damn, but to do that with old, clearly time-darkened paper is a crime against humanity. The only way to hope to make anything halfway decent from it is to go through it and manually clean it up. The secondary approach of letting the computer try gives results that are just plain disappointing:
It is *somewhat* clearer. But a whole lot of data is simply lost and unrecoverable, even with manual, skilled and talented cleanup. The “Enhance” button only does so much.
So if *you* have interesting aerospace diagrams and documents, *please* don’t do this. The minimum for text and diagrams is 300 dpi, grayscale, saved in a lossless format such as PNG or TIF. If the diagrams are the slightest bit faded, or if there is anything remotely colorful, scan in full color. Photos and art… full color and consider scanning at 600 or even 1200 dpi. Sure, the file sizes are way bigger. But storage space is vastly cheaper and more abundant than it was just a few years ago. And there are people, AHEM, who will scan this sort of thing for you, just to make sure it’s preserved.